The Tamale Lady

Christmas dinners vary, depending on where you are.

In Japan, after the war, they took a big interest in American culture, and adopted the whole "Christmas" thing because it looked like so much fun. Naturally, they got parts of it wrong. In Japan, the traditional Christmas dinner is a big bucket of KFC, because the Colonel spent a lot of money TELLING them that that's what Americans have for Christmas dinner. Now, if a Japanese wants KFC for Christmas, he has to reserve a bucket in advance -- that's how big fried chicken Christmas dinners are in Japan!

In Russia, on the other hand, they take their Christianity pretty seriously, and their traditional dish is a sort of wheat pudding with fruit and honey, each element of which has a certain religious symbolism.

Meanwhile, Americans dither about whether to do another turkey so soon after Thanksgiving, or maybe a ham instead?

Mexicans do tamales.

Maybe not ONLY tamales... Mexicans like ham, turkey, and grilled steaks as well as anyone else... but tamales are traditional.

I grew up only a handful of miles from the Mexican border, deep south Texas. Tamales are traditional there, too. I learned this when I was just a teener. The white folks will buy a turkey or ham at the HEB grocery, and the brown folks will order a bag of tamales from whatever restaurant suits their taste. And some of us did both.

I would have been around thirteen or so when the first Christmas came about with the Tamale Lady. There was a knock on the door. Since I was closest, I answered it.

Standing on the stoop was someone's abuelita, wrapped and bundled against the cold. All I could see was about half of her face, which appeared to be about three hundred years old. She smiled at me, revealing six or seven teeth.

"Le pido perdón," she said politely. "No quiero bother. ¿Quieres comprar unos tamales?"

I glanced past her. Behind her was a contraption whose ancestry included a little red Radio Flyer wagon. Upon it was constructed a platform of wood and brick, which contained a little charcoal fire, of all things. The rest of the platform was laden with foil wrapped packages. They smelled good.

"Um... cuanto cuesta?" I asked.

She smiled again. "Two daw-lors a dozen," she replied.

I paused. I like tamales just fine, and I had a couple bucks. However, I was thirteen, and living at home, and there was a chain of command to consider. "Um... un momento, por favor," I said. "DAAAAAD?"

And Dad came to talk to the Tamale Lady. And I felt bad.

Y'see, I don't want to say that Dad was the tightfisted sort... but, well, he made Scrooge look like a philanthropist when it came to money. He wasn't a MEAN man, or a GROUCHY sort, but any time there was a choice of whether or not to spend any coin, the answer was generally, "hell, no." In certain family circles, it is STILL talked about, the time he decided to save money by turning off the water heater at night. "Hell, all you gotta do is get up a little early and turn it on and light the pilot," he said. "You can still get a shower before you go to school. You just gotta get up a little early, is all."

Yeah. An hour early. And I note that he was never the guy who actually DID this. He finally gave in when the entire family was on the verge of mutiny that winter for want of sleep and hot showers in the morning. All to save roughly three bucks a month.

He wasn't much different with door to door peddlers, either. He did not buy band candy or encyclopedias, and if we wanted girl scout cookies, we had to hunt them down outside the grocery store, preferably when Dad wasn't around. So I felt kind of bad for this bent over little old lady with her little wagon and charcoal stove. Dad wouldn't be rude, but I was sure he'd send her packing in short order.

...and thus, my surprise, when I heard Dad call, "Kirk? Do you have any cash?" I turned around and went back into the room, and was stunned to see him standing there with his wallet in one hand and a twenty dollar bill in the other. I was so stunned, I dipped into my pocket and gave him the sawbuck I had on me.

Normally, I wouldn't have done this -- loaning cash to Dad was a crapshoot. He might pay you back, he might pay you back after you reminded him, or he might argue that he'd paid for something back in 1974 which exempted him from ever owing you money again -- but I was so stunned that he was buying ANYTHING at the front door that I went ahead and gave him the money. He promptly turned around and bought all the lady's tamales, which delighted her greatly.

I was then assigned the job of collecting the hot foil packages while they conversed on the stoop; it seems that she did this to make extra money to buy presents for the grandchildren, of which she seems to have had quite a few (she promptly broke out a wallet with an accordion foldy thingy with pictures of the entire horde.)

And so, in addition to the ham that year, we had tamales. Dad froze a lot of them, and we gave packs of them to my grandparents and various friends. Scrooge had his Marley and the Three Ghosts of Christmas, and Dad, it seems, had the Tamale Lady. Who'd have known?

The Tamale Lady turned up every Christmas week after that, and Dad always bought her out. I suspected that she was going right back home and loading up more tamales for sale, but, hey, more power to her. The tamales were as good as any tamales I've ever had, and better than most, and at that price, why complain?

And now I live in Colorado, where I'd worried at first about finding tamales... but it turns out there's a family run Mexican restaurant around the corner, and they posted a sign earlier in the month, ORDER YOUR CHRISTMAS TAMALES NOW... and I did. And as I type this, I'm eating a plate of delicious beef tamales, coated in green chile sauce and slathered with melted cheese.

The chocolate Yule log is gone now, and we've beat up that ham pretty good, and most of the sausages, and the turkey breast... but the tamales persevere. And for all I know, in the little cow town in deep south Texas where I grew up, a little old lady still tows behind her a smoking contraption on a once-red Radio Flyer wagon, and makes the money for her great grandchildren's Christmas presents...

Merry Christmas!